Kurt Wagner

The Lambchop frontman on Yo La Tengo, the Monkees, JAMC, and more.

Kurt Wagner, the 53-year-old frontman of the inscrutable, genre-bending alt-country outfit Lambchop, has logged countless hours on the road with various shifting band lineups, all while putting out 11 albums over the last 18 years and collaborating with artists as sonically disparate as experimental country crooner Cortney Tidwell and downtempo electronica act Morcheeba. It's quite an impressive CV for someone who didn't decide to start making music until he was 30.

When we spoke last month, Wagner and his band were smack in the middle of a six-week European tour in support of their excellent new album, Mr. M. He'd just wrapped up an "awesome" show in Belgium 10 minutes beforehand. The art of the live performance is important to Wagner as a music fan, and some of the following musical highlights of his life include gigs like a near-riot-inducing performance by the Cramps and an exceptionally foggy Jesus and Mary Chain show. Listen along with Wagner's picks with this Spotify playlist.

My dad was a research scientist and biochemist. When I was five, we'd just moved to Nashville from Washington, DC. In those days, Nashville was super-small and super-hick. We were like New Yorkers who had moved down there and were going, "Whoa, what the fuck?" There was one liquor store called Wendall Smith's that we'd make this pilgrimage to. We'd pick my dad up from work, go there, and my parents would put boxes in the car while I just sat there.

My folks had a lot of classical music, but they would also put on stuff like Tom Lehrer, Pete Seeger, and Kingston Trio. And they had Bob Dylan's The Times, They Are A-Changin'-- I would play it when they weren't around. It had this great lyrics sheet where it wasn't really the lyrics of the songs; it baffled the hell out of me that there was all this prose instead of the songs' lyrics. I kept thinking, "Well, they gotta be in there somewhere."

As kids, we didn't have the right Southern accent, so we were labeled as Northerners even though I don't have any Northern memories or associations. I learned to morph my speaking to fit in a little better. It took a couple of years.

At this point, I was thoroughly into music. My brother and I got our own little plastic record player. We were just so into the Monkees, man. On Saturdays, they would have all these country music programs, like Bill Anderson, or Del Reeves' Country Carnival, or Porter Wagoner, or Dolly Parton. We would turn the sound off and put on our Monkees records, and the country band would look like they were playing the songs. Sometimes it would sync up where the performer's mouth would move right along with Davy Jones' voice. It was fucking cool.

The Monkees came to Nashville. We had a neighbor down the street who worked at the venue box office who was going to get us in, but she couldn't. About 10 years later, she made up for it and got us into the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street tour, so all was forgiven.

We spent a year in England in 1973. My father was teaching and doing research at a university in Sheffield, so he brought the family. I went to school there and tried to blend in. It was a crazy rich time for music there-- the Kinks' "Apeman" was on the radio, Pink Floyd too. I went to see King Crimson live for 75 cents, it was fucking amazing. Elton John's first record came out, he was on "Top of the Pops", and I was like "Whoa, who's this dude?" I was coming alive as far as discovering live music. Up to that point, I never really had a chance to experience that.

My brother was buying all the records, but I finally bought Band of Gypsys by Jimi Hendrix. The British cover (above) was a lot different from the U.S. cover, and it was attractive to me, so I grabbed it. My brother was a much better consumer when it came to records. He was the tastemaker. I listened to whatever the fuck he was buying.

So we go back to Nashville, and we're going to concerts at the university. I was getting into the Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, the Flying Burrito Brothers-- I had this fetish about country rock, mainly because I was insanely crazy about the steel guitar. I would go to a tw0-level shop in downtown Nashville that was just dedicated to steel guitars. I initially didn't get country because it had this whole association with a weird, redneck universe that I was trying to figure out. I had a chip on my shoulder and hair down to my ass, and there were only a few people who had hair down to their ass. And I had to walk everywhere since Nashville is a walking town. People would throw bottles at you and yell at you and try to harass you. You would get harassed quite a bit if you looked weird.

Oddly though, if you went to a bluegrass club, they would let you in and welcome you quite warmly. They'd let you be a teenager in there and drink beer, so we got exposed to all this great bluegrass. All these guys were incredibly fast pickers, and it was just mind blowing-- that's what I ended up loving about speed metal.

I arrived at Memphis to study at the Memphis Academy of Art. It was a completely different place than Nashville: there were thriving art and gay communities. And there was different music-- it totally changed my opinion of what music was and what it could be. Alex Chilton was there, so he was bringing all these New York bands to come and hang and record. It was very exciting. I started playing in an art school band called Seafood Orchestra, where a bunch of friends got together and made a bunch of noise. We wrote songs and recorded with Jim Dickinson, which was crazy. The recordings never came out, but we got the experience of working with Jim. It was a great awakening. Prior to that, my experience with making music was how virtuosic you were with your technical abilities, but I found something about it to be shallow. This was much more real and interesting to me.

There was this shop called Select-O-Hits, where you could go in the back room and there were mountains of 7" records-- just loose, no covers or anything-- in six-foot piles. You could wander and wade through vinyl. There were a lot of old Sun Records 7"s, mostly reissues, but we kept fooling ourselves that maybe we'd find an original. Elvis Presley died while I was in Memphis. Sex Pistols came while I was there, but I was working on a project I had to turn in the next day. I figured they would come back, but I fucking blew my chance.

I saw the Cramps at the Orpheum. They were recording Songs the Lord Taught Us, and once they were done, they did a show downtown. I got upstairs seats, which turned out to be a good idea. The place was packed and [lead singer Lux Interior] got kind of crazy. He got down on the grand piano they had in the orchestra pit and was jumping on it and pulling the strings off it. They shut the power down, but Lux was still down there screaming at the crowd to riot, to really tear the place up. I looked at the doorways, and all of the sudden there were all these cops with billy clubs, tapping them in their hands. Things were getting intense. This went on for 15 minutes, and I guess they relented for some reason-- I guess they didn't want to beat the shit out of everyone-- so they turned the power on and Lux finished the show. It was so cool. At that time, they were at the peak of their scary-beautiful powers.

In 1983, I was just graduating at the ripe age of 21 because I started college early. I went to Montana for graduate school to study art and paint. I was in a little town called Bozeman, which I picked because of its isolation. It was far away from everything so I could just concentrate on art. There weren't any distractions. You would do art and take part in the national sport of Montana: drinking.

I went back to Memphis, and it was a different place when I got back. I started working as a sign painter. I also worked at an art supply store. I was really just trying to accumulate enough money to move to Chicago. When I got to Chicago, I moved in with two friends. We had a loft on the top floor at 1300 Belmont. I got another job at an art supply store, just trying to make it in the world of art. I loved Chicago, but it was the only city I lived in where I wasn't playing music. It seemed like everyone was involved in cliques and groups, and they weren't very welcoming to outsiders, which freaked me out, because I was gullible. I was like, "Hey, what's up y'all?" They probably thought I was a goober.

I only lasted in Chicago until the day after the Super Bowl, when the Bears won. Chicago ended badly. First, my girlfriend left me. Then, my roommates decided they wanted more money out of me. I quit my job at the art store because they were racists. Then, I couldn't find another job, because I was banished from the art supply scene. So I gave myself six months to find a job, and I couldn't find a job. Not even a pizza delivery job. They wanted me to take a job as a window dressing dude at a big department store and all I had to do was take a lie detector test. I kept saying "no," but they kept calling me back up to take it.

Never take a lie detector test. It's the most humiliating experience. I just went in there and told the truth, which was what I thought you were supposed to do, but my answers were not what they wanted to hear. "Have you ever stolen anything?" "Well, when I was a kid, I stole chewing gum." [laughs] Apparently, that's not good if you're working in a store. It was stupid, and I was an idiot. I remember riding the train home in the front car of the El, and I felt like I'd taken acid.

I went back to Nashville intending to just hang out there for a couple days, and I ended up staying because I fell in love with a woman named Vicky Wilburn. I knew her from high school, and the relationship lasted until she moved to L.A. Initially, I moved back with my family. Oddly enough, my brother moved back in with my family too, so that was kind of weird. I stayed with them for about six months until I could get back on my feet. I also started writing songs. I was out of my mind, heartbroken and freaked out. So I started writing words. It was all spontaneous. I'd turn on the tape recorder and start filling up cassettes, one after another. This friend of mine went through a similar situation in his life where everything all fell apart, so he just locked himself in a room and learned to sing Hank Williams songs and started writing songs on his own. I connected with him, in that both of us were finding our way in this weird world of pain and depression. It probably saved my life.

I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain after I moved back to Nashville, and it's one of the most amazing concerts I can remember. The entire club was filled with fog, to the point where you couldn't see three feet in front of you. The crowd had to wander through this fog, just following sound. They had set up on the floor, so there wasn't a stage. They were just in this weird corner in the club. You could see them when they came out, but they would use the light in weird, indirect ways so the fog would change color. There were rumors that they would only play 20-minute shows. Nonsense. Those guys played a long time and it was fucking great. I have still yet to see a show like that.

There was no art scene in Nashville; no one was interested in showing my art. It was too big, too weird, whatever. It just didn't fit. So I started hanging out at these weird clubs and listening to songwriters like Townes Van Zandt. He played around the corner from where I was living, so I'd go check him out. I started really thinking about songwriting and going to these songwriters' nights. I'd never perform, but I wanted to see what the songwriting thing was all about. I started meeting these oddballs. I wouldn't say they were terrible, but they didn't fit the mold. There was this fucking guy from Chicago who was a cab driver that just sang truck driving songs. He was hilarious! I was fascinated by all that shit.

I started playing music with my friends Mark Trovillion and Jim Watkins almost immediately after moving back to Nashville. We started making music as Posterchild in my basement. We had a Casio and taped a microphone to a bedpost. I was playing some fucked up guitar and writing songs like crazy. We would make up the titles of the songs and then I would spontaneously sing them. Really raw, cool shit. Our first show was at a place called Guido's. It was like a writer's night in a pizza parlor near the University. We got up there and did about five or six songs, just us and a Casio. We got the shit heckled out of us, but it was awesome. There were about 20 people, and they all thought we sucked. It was great.

We made our first 7" as Posterchild, which made our focus move towards going into a studio and making a recording, which was pretty exciting. But then we got a cease and desist from Warner Brothers. A nice gentleman asked us to not use the name Posterchild, because it was close to the name Poster Children. Dude had nothing to do that day, apparently-- we were like, "How the hell did he hear our record?" I knew there was no way a band that just put a 7" out was going to fight Warner Bros. So we acquiesced and tried to figure out another fucking name. I was determined to call it R.E.N. because those were the different letters between Posterchild and Poster Children, but I think we would have gotten ourselves in a little more trouble. [laughs] There were a lot of "Ren & Stimpy" associations around that time too, so it was probably not such a smart idea.

We batted around all kinds of stupid names for weeks, like Turd Goes Back. Not the smartest stuff. It got frustrating. At the time, I was working on hardwood floors, and we were riding in the van going back to the job. Mark Trovillion has a tendency to just spout out phrases and words for no particular reason, and he just went "Lambchop!" I thought, "Well, that's good." I went home to try it out on my future wife, Mary Mancini, and she smiled. When pretty women say Lambchop, their faces end in an upturned smile as opposed to a frown, and that made the decision for me-- that, and I was sick of dealing with it. I figured nobody was gonna fucking call their band Lambchop. It was stupid enough that no one would sue us.

Around that time, I saw Yo La Tengo. They were working on a record in Nashville and somehow I talked them into playing there. We opened for them, and I strung up maybe 12 flashlights from the ceiling on strings and turned them all on. They were spinning around, and that was the only light in the club. It was amazing.

After we put out a few 7"s on Merge, they were like, "Hey, why don't you do an album?" So we did I Hope You're Sitting Down/Jack's Tulips. That was two records, so we figured it should have two titles-- it was very confusing. By How I Quit Smoking, we were totally taking the recording idea seriously. After that album, I hooked up with [producer] Mark Nevers and made What Another Man Spills. It unlocked a world of recording that we'd never really understood. We didn't have the skills. Mark had the skills.

For the first Lollapalooza, they went around and asked local bands to open up. Some guy found our 7" and thought it was really cool, and asked us to do that. So we followed Tool, and we killed, it was awesome. The next thing you know, a couple years later, "Hey, you guys wanna do a leg of Lollapalooza?" Like, "Really, us?" We thought it was crazy. But we all went in three vans and did it. Dude, it was great. We met a lot of really great musicians, like the Stereolab guys. Of course, the crew hated us. The crowd was fairly disinterested. We were going up against George Clinton and Green Day, so where do you think people went? But Nick Cave played after we were done, so we went to see Nick Cave every fucking time, and it was nice.

By then, we'd been to Europe, and it was not what I expected. The people there loved us. It was exciting. I was getting exposed to a lot of European music, like the Notwist-- those guys were beautiful. I was also fascinated by the Hamburg scene that was going on. There was a renaissance of singing in German while using indie rock ideas with bands like 18th Dye and Blumfeld. They were taking the language back, which I thought was incredible because there was a period of time when a lot of European groups were singing in English. It sounded stupid and weird. [laughs] I would always ask, "Why don't you guys just sing in your own language?" "Because no one is interested in our language!"

By this point, we were playing big places in England. Amazing stuff. We were a huge band at that point-- not as far as popularity, but as far as the number of people in it. The shit we pulled off back then was crazy, I really don't know how we did it. We were traveling with 20 musicians! I was listening to crooners, more German electronica, a lot of soul music. I would listen to my friends' music, mainly. I had accumulated enough friends who were releasing music that was exciting, and I loved listening to it. This is when my list gets a little fuzzy, dude. I'm really bad with remembering names in general. I'd give names, but I'm sure they're wrong.

[Vic's passing] was a major drag. It took a while to shake off and understand. I'm still working through that. Being his friend and loving him, knowing that day would come came with the territory, though you hoped it wouldn't. But it does, and it did. His death definitely influenced my life. He was a big part of it. He was the one who convinced me that I wasn't crazy, and that making art and music was a thing worth pursuing. Not having him around means he's not around to hear it, and that's a hard thing to get used to.